Key wrong on child poverty debate
You have to wonder what went through the Prime Minister’s mind when he thought it was a good idea to say it’s easier to count rodents than kids in poverty.
John Key might have been asked to compare the Government’s target of making New Zealand predator-free by 2050 to their reluctance to target the number of children living in poverty but there was nothing stopping him from saying it was an unrealistic comparison.
But no, Key went right ahead saying ‘‘it’s more binary in terms of whether there’s a rat, a stoat or a possum there or whether there isn’t because you can understand that’’.
Translation: ‘‘We can count rodents easily - neglected, abused or sick children living in cold, damp houses not so much’’.
And just to make sure nobody was confused, he went on to point out that the advice he got on measuring child poverty was ’’airy-fairy’’.
All of this on the same day that his Conservation Minister, Maggie Barry, was due to announce a target to raise wild kiwi numbers to more than 100,000 by 2030. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so incredibly important.
The Government is no stranger to targets - they have Better Public Service goals coming out their ears for everything from carbon emissions to broadband speeds to prisoner reoffending. And as for targeting at-risk kids, they have plenty of checklists for that as well. At the heart of the Government’s overhaul of the ‘‘blunt’’ decile tool that determines much of the funding for schools is a plan to target atrisk kids using set criteria.
Children will be measured against four risk factors: a parent who had been to prison; if they or a sibling had suffered child abuse; if their family had relied on a benefit for a prolonged period; or if the child’s mother had no formal qualifications.
The Government has already started the ball rolling on this targeting by freezing schools’ operational funding in this year’s Budget and instead throwing money directly at 150,000 at-risk kids. If it’s easy enough to measure vulnerable children in schools with set criteria, what makes it so difficult to do it at home?
Key has been a driving force behind the National Party’s softer face towards the poor and stressing the Government’s attempts to get them back into work rather than punishing them for being lazy.
His reluctance to back the Children’s Commissioner on measuring child poverty and putting a plan in place to reduce it is completely at odds with their usual over-zealous approach to targeting.
But then putting a number on how many children are living in poverty is admitting there’s a problem, or even worse, a crisis.
- Jo Moir is a Fairfax Media political reporter.